You’re ready to start working from home and heard about medical transcription. But you aren’t sure. The pay rates sound promising, but how realistic are they? Can you really be a medical transcriptionist for your stay at home job?

With the right training, you most certainly can. However, you need to be aware that not all positions in this industry are home based.

Training is a very important first step into this career. If you don’t get good quality training, you’re going to have a very hard time finding work, especially from home. You have to know what you’re doing. You have to convince potential employers that you will be a productive and accurate transcriptionist. You have to know how you’re going to cope working from home, which isn’t as easy as many people assume it is.

When you’re considering a home based career, I like to suggest that you learn your job skills at home too. There are a few really good medical transcription training programs out there that will let you do your studies entirely at home, usually at your own pace as well. It’s great for learning the job skills as well as how you’ll cope with staying at home to work, which is an entirely new skill for most people that takes a surprising amount of time to figure out. There are a lot of distractions at home that slow many people down, plus the isolation to deal with.

That said, if you enjoy having a stay at home job, medical transcription is a pretty good one. The hours for stay at home medical transcriptionists are usually very flexible. You can decide what your work hours will be, so long as you meet whatever the agreed upon minimum is with your employer. If you work at night better than during the day, or mornings, you can set your schedule to be during those times. If you need time off for a special event, you can usually manage that. If you need to work while the kids are sleeping, that’s usually possible too.

You aren’t going to earn a spectacular living as a stay at home medical transcriptionist. You can earn a fair living, with $15 an hour being fairly possible once you have a bit of experience. $20 an hour is harder to achieve. Don’t be surprised to earn under $10 an hour early on when you get a job, as you learn that the reality is different from medical transcription training, no matter how well trained you were. Being at home means you’ll probably be paid on production, so as your skills improve, so will your effective hourly pay rate. Call it motivation to work hard on improving your skills.

Get free information from Career Step about their online medical transcriptionist training.